I thought that sheet music would be one of the last things to go Kindle (along with picture books) but Amazon just announced that they have just contracted to have a large library of sheet music available on the Kindle.

Cool.

Assuming for size difficulties, the sheet music is recommended (“optimized”) for the Kindle DX, but it can presumably be read on the earlier devices. To see some of the titles available go to the Kindle Store and put in FreeHand Music and a composer. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue no.21 from Well-tempered Clavier is available here.

We looked at the number of requests facutly requests which we had to cancel, either because they were too new or too popular (no other library would lend them). We found that about 10% of these requests could have been filled by purchasing a Kindle Book. Why not try to fill these in a faster, and often, cheaper way?

An interesting sidenote: almost half of the requests we could have filled through the Kindle Store were scholarly monographs.

Audience

So far we are limiting the service to faculty only but this is just to keep the demand down. If it takes off we will buy more devices and open it up to other university populations (staff, grad students, etc).

Basic Checkout and Checkin

The ILL staff search for any book that is a popular title or too new to see if Amazon has a Kindle version. If so, the item is purchased, uploaded to a device, the device is then deregistered (this prevents users from purchasing on our Amazon account) and delivered along with a charger through our faculty delivery service to the patron.

Upon return, the device is emptied of all titles (except for the Kindle user guide), reregistered to our ILL Amazon account, and plugged into a charger, to await the next request.

So far this has worked ok. We are excited to provide a new service which will hopefully fill a need and prevent over-lending and borrowing of popular/too new titles, as well as (eventually) saving money.

— UPDATE 6/16/09 —

Since Amazon has continued to deny any written agreement with us, we have decided to discontinued our (brief) pilot. I hope to update further in the future.

As more and more traditional print publications begin to discard the print model and publish digitally, it seems that the last type of publication purely in an analog format will likely be the picture book.

Holding up a large book with bright illustrations and the touch of the pages as you turn them. The sound of the simple words as you read them out loud. The feeling of the child in you lap leaning forward to take in the whole scene depicted, eyes wide and intent. These are essential parts of the picture book experience.

Unfortunately, these are exactly the parts that ebooks and ebook readers cannot duplicate. Color is not so much an issue anymore now that the flepia has come out (undoubtedly other readers will follow suit).

I have written before about my interest in using Amazon’s Kindle for circulation and interlibrary loan. Yesterday I received a response from Amazon about doing so. On the phone, the Amazon rep. and I reviewed the public policy found here under section3. Digital Content, subsection Restrictions:

Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content.

Amazon said this only applies to for-profit ventures. “If you’re gonna let someone borrow the Kindle just to read a book, you should be fine.”

Since my interlibrary loan department does not charge for interlibrary loan use, we would essentially be loaning for free. Good news to our library and many others I would guess. I am looking forward to seeing how this affects our collection development and patron reaction when we implement the service.

— UPDATE 3/16/2009–

Since there has been a lot of traction on this post, I want to share a word of caution that may or may not have been implicit in my original post:

Amazon states in its Terms of Use that each agreement is sort of in perpetual Beta:

Amazon reserves the right to amend any of the terms of this Agreement at its sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the Kindle Store or the Amazon.com website. Your continued use of the Device and Software after the effective date of any such amendment shall be deemed your agreement to be bound by such amendment.

I recommend everyone who is interested in loaning Kindles in libraries first contact Amazon for the customized OK. Again, I would hope that this update is redundant and you would have already done this :).

I have been looking into the possibility of libraries using the Kindle to support circulation and Interlibrary Loan now for about 6 months. Now that Amazon has released their second version of the eReader, I thought I would share some of the things I have found on the web about libraries using it. If you know of others, by all means post in the comments.